Ronney Black dot Com

The Buckeye State Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association held this year's convention at the Belterra casino and resort in southern Indiana. Now, I'm not much of a casino person, in fact I pretty much avoid them and any notion of taking a chance with my few dollars.  I thought the trip was going to be a disaster when after 33 miles of travel the check engine light came on.  I almost went into a panic and then realized all I had to do was call the dealer. The service tech who answered the phone said don't worry about the light until the car starts running badly.  So it turned out to be an enjoyable trip.

The facility is really pleasant. Not grand but nice.  Kenny Robinson and I rode into the little town of VeVay - did I say little.  Nuff said.  The best part of the trip however was the ride back. It was a gorgeous day for a ride with the top down, and to top it off the check engine light was, by some magic, turned itself off.

Don't believe everything you hear about sqlserver being faster than mysql. Converting from slqserver to mysql improved the performance of my web app dramatically. It may do the same for you.

The last two weeks have been busy as all get out. After building a few data entry and reporting pages for the Elect Pernel Jones Jr web app I found that the app kept crashing. At first I though the problem was related to using datasets. Replacing the data sets with CBO's led to a slight performance improvement but as it turned out the main problem was related to running msde and / or sqlexpress 2005 in a constrained memory configuration.  Now I know we have heard that ms sql server will run the pants off mysql. At least thats what the majority of posts on the net assert. What goes unsaid in those statements is the fact that sqlserver and it's variants run well provided they have enough memory.

Well let me say this about that. If you are running an app on a hosted web server and are looking to improve performance  then you may be disappointed with ms sqlserver.  In my configuration I have a vps with 768 meg of ram. I gave 256 to the sqlserver versions of my app and found the server running out of memory as multiple people (4) began using the app and running reports. Not only did the apps crash - but the lack of memory took down the whole server - requiring periodic reboots. Reducing the sqlserver memory to 128 did not improve matters - in fact it just slowed things down more. So here's what I did. 

First I installed slqexpress thinking that msde had memory leaks.  That did not take care of the problem. So I created an odbc connection, imported my tables into access. Brought up the mysql navigation toolkit, exported my access files to mysql, installed the mysql net connector, reworked my DAL to accomodate the mysql net connector and bang. Lengthly reports that timed out under sqlserver breezed through under mysql.

But, it was not quite  easy as I said. Here are some things to look out for. You can't pass a dbnull to a mysql date - if you do mysql saves the date as 0000-00-00 which asp net does not know what to do with.  The mysql navigation toolkit by default builds tables using the latin1 character set. You will probably want to change that and use the utf8 character set. Your stored procedures and views may need a bit of rewriting but none of it is complicated.  The online mysql docs are pretty decent but I wound up putting out $50 for Paul DeBois' MySql book. And I'm glad I did.

So if you have trouble with poor performing web apps, you may want to give mysql a look. It made a big difference for me.

Well the work continues on the Pernel Jones Jr Election website.  Over the Memorial Day weekend I did a bit of visiting with family and chores around the house. In the midst of it all however I found that the Pernel Jones Jr website was running slow as all get out.  At times the pages would not load, in fact the entire web server was being brought to its knees. I thought for a while that the problem was msde but after spending a day prepping mysql to load the 500 thiusand records I found that the problem was really related to the dataset datatable objects. It seems that these two gizmos are memory intensive and a large query - or several large queries will consume huge amounts of resources. So a redesign is in process....

This problem occurs when the parameters and field names are not spelled exactly the same - so use all caps for field nams and params and the problem should - might go away.

That says it all. PJ, as known by his friends and family, is once again running for a seat on the Clevleand City Council.  In the last election, four years ago, he lost the vote by a mere 14 points.  His opponent had the backing of  mayorial candidate Frank Jackson and a host of other notables. Since then things have changed.Many residents in the ward are upset about the current council person's performance and would like  a change. PJ's campaign is capitalizing on that sentiment with the phrase A New Way Forward For Ward 5. I'm supporting Pernel Jones Jr and urge you to do so as well. Volunteers are needed and as always, campaign contributions will be much appreciated. www.perneljonesjr.com

Well the light bulb finally came on. Some time ago Verniki said I should get a pair of terrabyte drives - one for storage and the other for backing up. So Now that I have the drives I'm trying to figure out how to share them with Peabody - my ubuntu box and the others windows boxes on the network.  Well It finally dawned on me that I can format one of the drives as ext3 under linux, then mount the drive and share it out as a samba share. So I found this neat web page with a step by step that worked like a charm. How to Setup Samba under Ubuntu It covered it so well that my share worked the first time I tried it. Very good - so here are a few of the notes to myself
stop samba = sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop
edit samba config file = sudo /etc/samba/smb.conf
start samba = sudo /etc/init.d samba start

Thats too smoove

My linux trip is fraught with tricks and turns. I started up my machine a few days ago and noticed that sound was missing.  After some consternation I googled up a solution.  It seems that a recent system software update fouled somehting up - sort of like windows might do. It turns out that the I had to add myself to the sound users group.  Here are the steps

see if you are a member of the sound group - getent group | grep audio

if you dont see your login id do this :

sudo adduser XXX audio

test  sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp - this sends static to the speakers - stop it with a control C

that seemed to fix things - but for some strange reason the pulseaudio gizmo does not like my machine so I have to go into System-> Preferences-> sound and set the sound device as an OSS type to get things working.   Oh yeah - I had to tell Amorak and Audacious they should playback through an OSS rather than a pulseaudio -

So now music plays again in the Black House.

One of my clients operates a children's day care center. When he and his wife opened First Fruits Child Care in Euclid several years ago, they asked me to put together a system and an application that would allow them to track their attendance records. The key requirement was for a system that would generate a report allowing them to invoice the Cuyahoga County Department of Children's Services.  After using the application for several years it has grown with features and now allows for the calculation and tracking of time and reporting for another government  program which funds childcare development. The Early Learning Initiative, or ELI offers enriched services to kiddies who qualify.  

The ease with which First Fruits Child Care manages their information led us to offer the same features as a web based application.  A demonstration version of The Childcare Attendance Tracking System is available at www.catsdemo.cyberorgs.com    Check it out and let me know what you think.                                        

Back in the days when Mozambique and Angola fought for independence from Portugal, the phrase A Luta Continua captured the imagination and attention of those of us who supported the anti-colonial movement.  'The Struggle Continues' came to mind Saturday afternoon after having spent two and a half days fighting with flakey memory chips while putting together a new machine.  The project started when Will pointed out the ease with which Vmware allows one computer to run multiple simultaneous operating systems.  My goal was to set up a machine  which hosted several versions of windows and linux for software development and testing.  Most of my work these days is split between Asp Dot Net with Visual Studio 2005, Dreamweaver for maintaing asp sites, and Delphi for my now legacy windows apps.

Microcenter had a special on Intel processors so I picked up a q9300 along with an asus P5Q SE motherboard. I already had a case and miscellaneous hard drives lying around so all I needed was memory. No problem.... Newegg had 4 gig of Corsair Dominator PC 8500 1066 on sale so I ordered 8 gig and while they were in transit,  John put the other parts together using some 1 gig memo sticks I had laying around.

Everything was fine - I put xp pro and Ubunto 8.10 on the box and watched it fly. Pc Wizard 2008 ran up some incredible numbers.  Really impressive.  When the memory arrived I thought everything was going to be fine....

Think again. I popped all 4 sticks in,  and the machine failed to boot.  Whoa - my first thought was that the power supply could not handle the load so I pulled out two chips and booted up - things looked good. Windows kicked in and ran pretty good.  Ubuntu on the other hand gave me all kinds of trouble. In the midst of figuring out what was going on I saw that xp was also freezing and throwing temper tantrums whenever it encountered a decent workload.

So after fiddling about with the bios more than I should have, I reinstalled xp and Linux on another drive - still no joy.  I finally went to Microcenter, picked up 4 gig of generic memory on sale for $30 after rebate and bang, everything started running smoothly. Called New Egg and complained that only one of the four memory chips worked.  They agreed to a refund. Let's see what happens.

So now that the hard part was over I could finally get down to business. I booted into Ubuntu, put both vmware workstation virtualbox on the linux side and created a xp virtual machines with each. I then installed vwd 2005 express in each of the virtual machines to see which ran best.  The results were mixed.  In general, there was not much of a difference between the speed of Virtualbox and VmWare.  VmWare found my sound card, VirtualBox did not. VmWare seems smoother than VirtualBox, VirtualBox found all the keyboard keys and they work as expected.  VirtualBox does not seem to handle windows resizing as well as VmWare.

The performance testsof Visual Web Developer vwd results were problematic in both virtual machines.  Switching from  source code view to design mode takes a long time in both environments as vs 2005 builds all the visual controls each time it switches to design view. I was concerned about this in the native xp environment and erroneously thought throwing more horsepower at the problem would fix it. But the performance of vwd 2005 in  native xp on the new machine has been disappointing.

I downloaded and installed the vwd 2008 express and noticed that things are improved.  Vwd 2008 seems to load the controls once and keep them in memory so the switch lag is gone.  Now all seems well and I'm leased wth the setup.

Happy New Year to all. I hope your holidays were pleasant. When I was young all the boys on my street would visit and play with each other's toys on Christmas.  My favorite visits were to Lindale's, who had an American Flyer train set which was a bit different from my Lionel. American Flyer and Lionel were the dominant train companies in the fifties and sixties and the owners of each set had pride in their outfit while respecting and admiring the features of the other.  Unlike the Windows and Mac/Linux 'wars' of today.

This holiday season was much like my childhood days in that my buddies and I played with and demonstrated Windows and Linux systems to each other. Will is quite an accomplished Windows system administrator. He showed how Windows servers can assist in the deployment and managment of multiple desktops in an organization. Really impressive stuff. I was so impressed that I came to the office, fired up an underutilized machine and installed Win Xp Pro with VmWare. Then I used VmWare to install a Windows 2000 Server instance. It worked fine after I figured out that I had to pin W2K to one processor on my dual core AMD machine.  All was good in the neighborhood. Really slick stuff. The W2K server runs like a charm - just as expected.

So I fired up a session of VmWare and installed an Ubuntu 7.10 instance. Again it worked like a charm. In fact both W2K and Linux were running at the same time and my 'client' pc's were able to see and utilize their shares and web pages. Real slick stuff. The VmWare machines however seemed a little sluggish because the host machine has only 2 gig of ram.  I started thinking about a decent long term solution and realized two things. I needed a machine and an os that would utilize more memory. Figuring out the machine part is not too challenging, pick a dual or quad core processor and mobo capable of 8 or 16 meg of ram and put either Vista or Linux on the box and off we go.

Having been trained as in both Unix (SCO)  and Windows (NT 4) system administration I realize that I have a warm spot in my heart for Linux that Windows never garnered.  Back in the day - I won't say which day - SCO ran a series of ads on in computer magazines. The ads pictured a desktop computer on a table in a glassed room.  The PC had many cables coming from the back along with the heading Instant Mainframe.  Now in those days mini's and mainframes ruled the roost and PC's were just becoming important as users realized that they could build their own data and reports without having to depend on and wait for the computer department to handle their requests. Networking as we know it was not quite full blown and Novell was just starting to get it together.  Yet the promise of low cost, centrallized data stores and applications with PC's and terminals having access was tremedous.  At my earliest I jumped on the chance to realize that potential with an SCO rig on. 

A few years later Microsoft came around with  NT 4 which was almost reliable. One of my employers at the time was running a Pick database on ATT System V and needed to upgrade his systems.  The vendor of the primary application pushed the benefits of their Windows version and we bought into NT 4.  It certainly was not as stable - In fact it was really problematic. Coming from the really stable unix world where we booted systems and let them run literrally for years without downtime, to the Win NT 4 world where we had  to reboot weekly  - or is it now called refresh - was a real drag.  In my mind Microsoft's server products have still not rivalled the Unix experience.

And all this is in mind as I think about my future system, which at this point seems to be a quad core intel processor with 8 gig of ram with Linux as the host operating system and Windows Xp, 2KServer, 2003 Server and Vista as guest installations under VmWare.  Wish me luck as I start the New Year with a new vision. I'l keep you posted.

Here's a shout to our new client. Ala Ritz Kiddie College in Cleveland. Ms Denson and her crew signed up for and have been using the RBA Webservices Child Care Attendance and Tracking System for almost a month now. They, along with First Fruits Child Care, have been pleased with the applicaton. Let me know if you would like a demo....

And by the way fusemail has been humming along with no trouble. I may have a solution.